It's Kathie Lee Gifford's Birthday!

I heard on the radio that Kathie Lee Gifford is 46 today.

Um, did somebody forget to tell me that for daylight savings time we were turning our clocks back NINETEEN YEARS?

OK. You know, I'm all in favor of women propping up low self-esteem by lying about their ages. But apparently we've got to draw up guidelines so it won't run so completely out of control. I mean, you go to the natural history museum and you'll see, like, a Pterodactyll with a placard in front of it saying, "Paleolithic era." You'll see a caveman with a card saying, "Mesozoic era." But you probably won't see a Brontosaurus with a sign saying "Just turned 46 today!"

Why? Because nobody is stupid enough to believe it.

I take that back. Some people believe anything. They see Susan Lucci in person, they call her "Erica" and smack her in the face. They ask Tom Bosley what Richie and Joanie are up to. They ask Ricky Martin about his girlfriend. These people might fall for it. Some of the smarter of the stupid people might think, well, I thought she was older than that, but I figured maybe like in '7 Days' she went back in time a few years."

Anyway, I propose we do two things:

First, we need federal guidelines regulating how much personalities can lie about their ages.

I mean, there are laws that keep Hostess from calling Twinkies "Naturally good!" in their advertisements. Why can't we have a law that prohibits aged celebrities from so ridiculously misrepresenting their ages? Call your congressman and let's get some kind of federal regulation.

Second, let's draw up a scale to convert Kathie Lee Gifford's age into human years.

I don't want to be rude, but I think it'll be somewhere between the celsius-to-fahrenheit conversion and the conversion from dog years to human. Maybe we could even come up with pocket cards so we could all re-calculate it every time she has a birthday, like those cheat-sheets morons use to calculate how much they should tip their waiters. I'm no rocket scientist but what the heck -- I'll give it a crack. The only equation I know is e=mc2 and though I'm absolutely positive KLG isn't 46 I'm also relatively certain her age isn't all that close to the speed of light, but it worked for Einstein so maybe it will work for us.

Now that we've decided on our equation, we need to make some minor adjustments: First, since the speed of light is a very large number, to balance it we'll need to divide by an equally large number: say, the number of times she mentions Cody or Cassidy that year. We'll call it CCC, for the Cody-Cassidy Constant.

Second, since Frank's sexual meanderings are obviously as tied to KLG's age as my home loan is to the GNP, it would probably help our equation if we could factor this in. I don't think Frank would be happy adding one just more notch to the ol' bedpost each year, so when we put in the FSA (Frank Screwing Around) constant let's square it.

Last, we should probably factor in KLG's claimed age. Let's call this KLGCA.

We finally have a workable equation:

e (KLG's age) = KLGCA - FSA-squared + mc-squared/CCC

Now let's test it with some data. KLGCA this year is 46. If I were Frank, FSA would be nearing the speed of light, but since he's old and Viagra's ten bucks a pop let's ramp this down to 7. I'd estimate KLG's weight around 140. I watched her show once and she mentioned Cody and Cassidy 495,355,842 times, and so if she does 200 shows a year CCC could be around 99,071,168,411. Let's do the math:

e = 46 - 7-squared + (140 * 186,212-squared/396,284,673)
= 46 - 49 + (140 * 34,674,908,944/99,071,168,411)
= -3 + 49.000
= 46

Something has gone horribly wrong with our calculations, but there's the bell. Let's try again tomorrow.

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